Doing Business in Financial Services Nowadays

(Posted by David Schapiro)

It has been barely two months since Lehman Brothers went under and sometimes it feels like we are living in a different century. Like many of us, I have been through a number of crises of different types – financial, industrial, geopolitical – and they all have at least one thing in common: they go away in the end.  The question is what happens in between…

As the CEO of a software company providing solutions to banks and insurers, the current financial crisis is of special interest to me, to put it lightly. As we offer products that help these companies improve their profitability, our business is going strong. But just like everybody else these days, we need to look into our crystal ball and plan for a potentially very different future.

Over the last few weeks (that seem like years) I have spoken with my customers – leading insurance and banking executives in the US and Europe – trying to build a model of what lies ahead for us in the future. It was intriguing to see how each individual had a unique insight about where we were heading.  But uniqueness is the problem; I was looking for a common ground on which to build a model.